


Blood of the Watch

by ageoftesla



Category: Overwatch (Video Game)
Genre: Dreams, Dreams and Nightmares, F/F, F/M, False Memories, Gen, Memories, Murder Mystery, Mystery, Nightmares, Secret Identity
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-04-05
Updated: 2017-04-05
Packaged: 2018-10-15 05:33:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 20,029
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/10550912
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ageoftesla/pseuds/ageoftesla
Summary: Haunted by dreams of her past life, Widowmaker deals with the consequences of killing an Overwatch agent.





	

* * *

(Somewhere in Europe; years ago)

Sterile, humming lights weaved through the thin slit in the gauze that covered her face. Her legs dangled and dragged on the cold metal floor. Friction sheared the skin off her knees. Her blood trailed on the steel. The shape of a heavy door drew near through the darkness.

Her arms hung from two thuggish men to either side of her. They dragged her through a hallway of an underground base. At the door, they dropped her. Her head fell to the floor with a thud. It pounded. Her brain and her mind shook. Couldn't hear what the men were saying. The door unlocked, a loud buzzing sound. They bent down and dragged her inside.

The inside of the room was warm and bright. A high power light stood in one corner. It was pointed straight at the door, and straight at a chair in the center of the room. The men were talking again. "Is this where we leave her?" She heard one of them say. "Where's the guy?" Same voice, it seemed.

"We don't even know his name," the other one said. He was heading out. One foot was back in the hallway already. "Come on," he said. "There's a reason we don't know this." The other man shrugged and left with him.

The door slammed shut behind them.

Barely conscious, the woman with her face covered in gauze lay on the floor. She moved up and down with her short breath. Her mouth was gagged with duct tape. The dreadful stench of the gauze glue crept into her nose with every breath. The only oxygen she took in flowed past her eyes. As did the hot carbon she exhaled.

The woman's arm moved, weakly at first. Her hand groped on steel. It drew closer to her face. Fingertips felt at the edges of the duct tape over her mouth. She dug under the adhesive, peeled off a band for her grip. And with as strong a grip as she could bear tore off the gag.

A sharp scream gave way to desperate gasps for air.

Her lungs filled with air. The woman lifted her arms. Lifted herself up onto her scraped off knees, her eyes watering at the pain. At first her breath was frantic. It calmed as she forced herself up. Knees trembling, her arms shook as she tore one hand off the floor. Her elbow bent. The blinded woman lost her balance for a moment. She brought her free hand to her face.

Her skin tensed as her fingers neared a crease in the gauze facemask, as she tugged on it. Her breath sharpened, accelerated as her fingers found purchase on the crack of the gauze. Picking at the cover, the skin rose off her right eye. She braced herself, sucked in a lungful of oppressive heat.

A strong grip closed around her wrist and her shoulder, and hoisted her off her knees and onto her toes. She was dropped into a chair, arms bent back, around the backboard and down to the seat, where they were tied together. A yelp, growling, snarling, all indicated bone breaking pain. Silk rope wound tight. Her throat ran dry.

The man who heaved her up grabbed a pad of paper and dropped it— _thump!—_ on a table. He dragged another chair into the room, legs scraping and screeching against the sheet steel floor. He sat down across from the woman tied up and face covered.

_Crack!_

“Argh!” she screamed, blinded by light. As her sight returned to her, even with the weight of blood drops pressing down on her eye, she could make out the man across her, first in silhouette, then gradations, color, detail. At first, she felt a touch of relief. She knew who he was. Horror followed.

Why was he here?

“State your name,” he said, as though it were the most normal thing in the world, as though the two of them weren’t exactly here, wherever this was. His voice was familiar. She knew his voice. Through the shock of pain, chemicals, or drugs, through a single blood covered eye, she knew the voice and visage of her husband anywhere.

She just couldn’t believe it. “Gerard,” she said, a whisper, nothing more.

The man picked up the paper. With a look of learning on his face, he wrote something down, shaking his head. He said again, “State your name.”

But she still wasn’t focusing on that. “Gerard, what’s going on?” She tried to remember the past few weeks. Gerard’s work called him to Italy, and ever dutiful, he answered. So she thought. He was director of something, she knew, but what exactly, she couldn’t remember. She couldn’t even remember whether he ever told her, whether she ever found out.

“State your name,” he said again, like those were the only words he could say.

“What happened in Italy?” Gerard worked in security. He was part of something big, something international. He made enemies and cheated death. As the fog in her mind cleared, she remembered those times he came back so late in the night. She remembered those fondly.

_Crack!_

Lungs begging, her pain couldn’t even escape her mouth. In near silence, another strip of the gauze mask fell to the floor. “State your name.”

“Why?” she choked out, catching her breath. “Why are you doing this?”

He leaned in, grabbed her face, turned it aside, and said into her ear, “This is going to be a long night. And I need to know what you sound like when you’re telling the truth, so I can tell when you’re lying.”

“I would never lie to you, my love.”

“You might. Once you see how much I lie to you. Now, state your name.”

The possibility crossed her mind, everything Gerard had ever told her, all the secrets he might have kept from her over the years. That it was all false, the way he felt around her, and the way he made her feel, how they loved each other, for a moment, she considered it. Why he did it, she might never know. She couldn’t see herself wanting to even begin knowing.

“Amelie Lacroix,” she said, a whisper, nothing more.

“And what is your line of work?”

* * *

(A motel; Munich, Germany)

She was an assassin, and she was a creature of instinct. Her arm shot out, snatched the handle of the knife hidden under the picture frame on the nightstand, and she lashed out, a flash of carbon steel. Like a whirlwind, tossing the covers about, she swept the entire space of the bed with the blade, slicing nothing but air.

Amelie’s muscles relaxed. There was no intruder, no danger. She looked down at her arm, couldn’t see in the darkness, but by instinct, she knew what was there. On her right arm, in fine calligraphy, black ink on her skin, was written ‘Cauchemar.’

In French, it meant ‘nightmare’; in code, ‘forget about it.’

She hit the light switch, stepped over to the nightstand again. The picture was missing. Placing the knife neatly back in place, Amelie looked down, where broken wood and glass shards lay scattered on the floor.

The wooden frame, the glass, those could be replaced. In time, they would be, and they weren’t that important to begin with. Amelie kneeled down in front of the picture, careful not to cut herself on the shards, and turned the frame over to the picture of a ruggedly handsome man with light oak hair. She plucked the photo out of the frame.

On its back were two names, both crossed out: below, ‘Gerard’; above, ‘Bishop.’

She supposed Gerard was Gerard Lacroix, a French national, and a hero. Apparently, he was also a man she once knew, or once admired. Amelie narrowed her amber eyes examining the writing. It was hard to discern, and seemed harder to even remember, but she pretty sure she wrote Gerard’s name first.

Every night, it was the last thing she saw as she fell asleep. And she couldn’t recall anymore, but it was the face she saw most in her dreams, the face of the legendary Gerard Lacroix.

It was also the face of her employer, Bishop. He didn’t have a first name, at least not one he was keen to share, not one that she knew. Her employer, more accurately her handler, Bishop was her link to the intelligence and black ops organization, Talon. Amelie was part of the black ops side, had been for two years, and had rapidly improved.

There was little known for certain about Talon, save that the United Nations declared it a group of terrorists. There was also little reason to simply take their word for it. They founded Overwatch, after all, noble as it may have been to start with, it hardly kept to that vision now. Now, it was nothing but Talon under a different flag. Intelligence, black ops, they handled what the rest of the world either didn’t want to or didn’t have the stomach for.

It was hard to say when she noticed the change, whether other people noticed it, and how fast. The change, in her mind at least, was gradual. So Amelie remembered. It started some years ago, the exact time frame, too murky to know for sure. Perhaps two years, when she joined Talon. Undoubtedly, they helped open her eyes, opened her mind to it.

Amelie dropped the frame and glass shards back on the nightstand, and slipped the picture under the pillow of the bed. She headed to the closet, where she kept her field operations equipment, and the bags of clothes she bought in preparation for whatever cover identity Talon devised for her.

Taking her equipment bag, she slung it onto the corner of the bed, and zipped open its many side pockets. _Il doit y avoir une note quelque part_ , she thought as she rummaged through looking for an old newspaper scrap about Gerard’s death. _Allons, ou est-ce?_ A crumpled up paper scrap found its way into the light, pinched between two blue fingers. She unfolded it and read, “Gerard Lacroix trouvé mort dans sa maison.”

In the top right corner was the date of publication, March 13, 2066. _Il y a deux ans_ , it was around the same time she met Bishop. Amelie’s head snapped back towards the pillow, to the picture underneath, and she reached over to grab it. She held it close to her eyes, newspaper clip right behind it, eyes flicking between the two. She flipped the picture over again, to the two crossed out names, then back again to the photo of the oak haired man.

“Pourrait être une coïncidence,” she supposed, though she was trained not to believe in coincidences anymore. In the intelligence tradecraft, surface coincidences were leads, and on the surface, this was one huge coincidence.

But she’d been down this road before.

Every time it came up in her mind, it was retreading the same steps all over again. What Overwatch once was, and what it had since become. When that transition started, and what caused it. When she joined Talon, and when Gerard died. When she met Bishop, and why Bishop and Gerard looked the same. It could be that Gerard and Bishop were one and the same, that for years he deceived the whole world until one night, he faked his death.

It was possible, Amelie thought time and time again, that he pinned his own death on his wife, who subsequently disappeared by his hand, never to be seen again. It was possible, but if it was true, then she’d immunized herself to it, because by now it sounded too farfetched. Moreover, it didn’t follow that Overwatch would deteriorate without the one mole dragging it down, though maybe he was only the tip of the spear in that infiltration.

And even all this missed the fact that a body was found at all. There was, at least, a double, but then there was Doctor Angela Ziegler to think about. Whatever anyone’s thoughts about Overwatch, her medical expertise was beyond reproach. No one was going to sneak a fake corpse past her. And the only way to reconcile that was built on even more baseless assumptions. And even then, she had to be vetted, and whatever problem that dragged the heroes into the gutter had to go all the way to the top, and by then, a Talon infiltrator was the least of their problems.

_Mais il existe une alternative_ , Amelie reminded herself. She looked hard at the photograph, folded the newspaper back with just left hand and tucked it into one of the pockets of the bag. _Il existe une alternative_ , she thought as she zipped all the pockets shut again, still staring, focused on the photo she set up every night as she went to sleep.

Still, coincidences demanded answers, and right now, Amelie had none.

She opened the main zipper of the bag. Hardened leather parted, revealing a full automatic rifle, a seven visor helmet, a grappling hook, and three venom mines inside. After a second’s consideration, she tucked the photograph beside the rifle, and then shut the bag. She left the bag on the bed, taking a glance at the clock.

‘5:40’

Amelie sat at the desk in the motel room with her right arm laid out, looking at the Cauchemar tattoo one more time. Her nightmare woke her up nearly an hour early, though she was grateful to have that extra time to run through her thoughts, even if they were the same thoughts she’d had before. Better to keep them fresh.

Under the desk, she kept a journal stashed away. She pulled it out, opened up to page seventeen. Amelie took a pen and marked a six in the upper corner of the page. There was a six marked in the corner of every page, and there were six journals before this one. One day, one page, among other things it was a way of keeping time.

Her natural sense of time was impaired. Her heart beat at one third the pace of a fit person’s heart, making it much more difficult to count seconds. Her memories sometimes faded, making it difficult to count days and months and years. Aside from her sight, her senses were dulled. It was hard to count instants without the natural flux of the environment. It was hard, but not impossible, since she could still count time through her brain. She could count time, but couldn’t feel it.

Each journal was one hundred pages long. Today was the six hundred seventeenth day since she started working for Talon, or at least that many days since she started keeping these journals. It was about two years. Two years she counted by mnemonics that others could count by instinct. She developed similar mental tools and tricks to measure smaller spans of time, too.

As she brought the tip of the pen to the page, she remembered the brand on her right forearm. She remembered what woke her up, and Amelie put the pen down. The journals were for dreams, not nightmares.

On the facing page on the left, where she couldn’t help but glance, there were notes, recollections of her dream from yesterday. It took her back to Annecy, to the top of a hill she used to climb to watch the sunset of the summer solstice. Amelie closed her eyes, and she saw the twilit flowers, the last light shining through gathering rain clouds. She could almost smell the moisture in the air, the pollen in the breeze.

There was someone sitting next to her, with light brown hair, what color exactly, she didn’t record, nor whether a man or a woman. The man from the photo was her first guess, but it was also something she would have written down. And inkling of recognition lingered, echoed. She knew the person, knew the conversation they had that twilight. There was a promise made.

The telephone rang. It was one of the few landlines still in service, rattling and clanging at the incoming call. Amelie let it ring to the speaker, and a kindly German woman’s voice came through, “Höflichkeitsruf, Frau Tremblay. Es ist jetzt 06:15 uhr. Wenn sie möchten, kann ich ein paar diners zum Frühstück empfehlen.”

_Right._ She asked for a wakeup call yesterday, at this time in the morning. Amelie walked over to pick up the phone. “Nein, mir geht es gut, danke,” she said before quickly hanging up.

The space under the door, normally lit whole by the light of the hall, had a box shaped shadow in the center. Amelie listened at the door, testing her hearing against the nearly silent footsteps outside. Talon was working on restoring and enhancing the function of her ears, and so far they made solid headway, her hearing was nearly back to normal. And it was quickly improving.

When the walker in the hall fell out of earshot, Amelie opened the door to pick up the box. It contained two file folders, a map, an envelope, another box, and a collapsible chess board with only a single white bishop piece. She opened up the board, turned it around to where the sockets to hold the other pieces were impressed, but there were no other pieces. “Thanks a lot, Bishop,” Amelie tucked the board into a drawer, leaving the bishop on the corner of the desk.

She opened the smaller box, which had a cell phone inside, and an index card with a few numbers on it. Amelie turned on the phone, blinked blankly as it asked for a security code before checking over the note card again. Four digits long, the note didn’t have a code that short.

‘2401’ she tried. The cell phone unlocked.

She stared for a second, “Of course.” Amelie was designated Asset 2401, codename Widowmaker, though the two had nothing to do with each other. She didn’t much care for her moniker, since her missions counted on subtlety. It seemed better that investigators following in her wake spent their time chasing some dead end lead than a real, albeit somewhat theatrical threat.

How they came up with it was a mystery. She reflected on her early assignments, which largely targeted married men. It was possible that was a coincidence, and thinking back, she wasn’t sure whether her name or the fact pattern of her assignments and targets came first. It wasn’t much of a conspiracy, either. Influential men were numerous, and most of them had wives. Maybe Talon was just selective about who they sent her to kill.

The origins of her codename probably weren’t worth that much thought.

There was nothing to be gleaned from the phone. It was a burner, through and through. Amelie set it aside and tossed the box in the little plastic trash can. She took out the map, a map of Munich with several locations circled in red ink. They seemed haphazard, but they probably weren’t. Bishop was thorough in his casing; there was a reason for the markings. She placed the map by the phone, and broke open the envelope next.

There was money inside, two hundred Euros, along with another note.

‘I marked some restaurants near the UN building. All within walking distance.’

Amelie flipped the sticky note over.

‘Find a consistent fashion for a few days. Do additional shopping if necessary.’

She rolled her eyes, set the note down, and then glanced at the closet. She flicked the note back on the desk, wondering what the hell he was talking about. As detail oriented as Bishop was, he was also sometimes detail obsessive, prone to overthink things. She’d gotten used to it over her working relationship with him, and though it could be inconvenient, it was pretty much always safe to follow his instructions to the letter. When to disregard him was a talent and apparently permission that Amelie uniquely possessed among Talon operatives. Insofar as it didn’t bite her in the ass, that was.

Amelie stuffed the money back into the envelope, and tipped over the big box to find just the two file folders left. She lifted the first one, labeled ‘EM,’ to take a look at the other one. The folder on the bottom was labeled ‘UN.’ She opened the first file.

EM stood for Estelle Matthieu, her cover identity for the duration of the mission. An identification card enclosed bore the seal of the Ludwig Maximilian University, a queen and her son in front of windows the size of royalty. Amelie took a closer look at the seal. _Pourrait être un roi_. Her eyes shifted to the picture of Estelle, which she faintly recognized as one of her own pictures from before joining Talon. Her skin in the picture was still white, natural, her hair black and not the dark blue it’d since become.

‘Estelle Matthieu’

‘Fakultät’

Brows furrowed, Amelie flipped ahead a few pages in the EM file, looking for the information about her purported employment. It had its own section, her background of two years as a research assistant in forensics, chiefly toxicology. Blinking, she muttered, “That’s one way to explain the venom mines.” The detail that she only started working after her husband died caught her eye.

Starting again from the first page, Amelie scanned through the report, writing down practical reminders in the margins. Estelle was a widow and more recently, an orphan. Her late husband, Leon, was a career investigator working for French national law enforcement. He was assassinated in a drive by shooting by an organized crime group, although not one with any immediate ties to his investigations. Where the file would go into detail, Amelie found a large section covered in ink.

The attached sticky note stated, ‘Irrelevant. And you don’t want to talk about it.’

The account of Matthieu’s parents’ death was far more concise. They died in a “car accident.” Even the Avignon police didn’t know any better. In the wake of these tragedies, Estelle left her home town, left the pain, and the memories, and she came to Munich, seeking work.

_A quoi ressemblent les gens d'Avignon?_ Amelie wondered, saying a few things out loud in all the regional accents of France she could think of. She spared another look to the closet, set the file down on the desk, and she walked over to grab the bags and empty them out on the bed. _Consistent fashion_ , she thought, something suitable for research work, mostly likely in a lab environment. She was looking for something vaguely middle class and something easy to wear a lab coat over.

It was easy to decide what she wasn’t wearing, at least, but she’d leave the final choice for when it was time to leave. Amelie returned to the desk, read over the EM file one last time before shutting it and moving on to the next.

* * *

(A rooftop; Munich, Germany)

In the rose glow of daybreak, her skin almost looked natural again. The light of the sun warmed the exposed skin of her arms despite the chilling January breeze on a rooftop six stories high. Her long, dark blue ponytail swept in the wind, dragging on the back of her head like a counterweight whenever she needed to look to the right. Amelie slid the sling of her leather bag off her right shoulder, eased it down to the surface of the roof and kicked it into place behind the raised parapet.

She pressed an earpiece in, and clicked a switch to hear the white noise and rustling cloth on the other side. Hearing footsteps, she reached into her pocket and pulled out the white bishop, which she set on the roof’s edge. Amelie sat down, opening her rifle bag as she waited. She took her weapon out and laid it in her lap. At the touch of a button, it converted from an automatic form to a long range form, barrel extended and scope raised. The scope was detachable, and she detached it.

Even without the scope attached, it could transform back into its more compact configuration, and Amelie closed it back in her bag. For watching, she would only need the scope, and even then, she only might need the scope. No one got to be a good sniper with bad eyesight.

Across the street was a United Nations office complex, their Strategic Command Center for Balkan Region Operations. There was an important meeting, starting today, spanning four days. Why a facility for the Balkan Peninsula was housed in Germany was anyone’s guess. As a gust blew through and tickled the top of her breasts through her low cut blouse, Amelie peeked over the parapet and saw a man roaming the hallways of the offices. He stopped and turned, the shuffling sound of his shoes on the floor bleeding through the transmitter in her ear, and he looked out the window, upwards, to her spot.

Soft spoken but with a certain intensity nonetheless, he said, “What are your lunch plans?” Amelie looked more intently, saw that he had a cell phone held to his mouth in addition to the wire running down the opposite side of his face. Lifting the scope to her eye, she could even see the phone was active and displaying an active call with an unidentified other end. But every few seconds, every heartbeat it seemed, there was a flash of something else on the screen. There was a line gradually filling up.

“If it works for you, it works for me.” As he continued with his one sided conversation, Amelie reminded herself he was talking to her. She knew, and from where she sat, it was obvious, but his delivery was convincing enough even to make her forget.

“Can we talk about something?” Amelie asked, for his ears only. Looking around, at least, she thought there was nobody else listening in, and she worked carefully to make sure there wasn’t.

Bishop slowly turned his gaze down, the street below. “Over lunch, or right now? Can it wait?”

“It can. It’s not really that big a deal, though, just something I need to get off my mind,” she told him.

“Alright, what is it?”

Amelie ran a hand through her long hair, setting down the rifle scope as a gust picked up again. “The water heater at the motel you found me, it was broken this morning. I thought maybe you’d have known something about that.”

His reflex was too fast to be faked. “When did they get a water heater?” he said.

“Motherfucker!” Her tone mixed anger, amusement, surprise, and validation. “It’s the middle of winter!” In the passing seconds, she caught on to exactly what he was saying. “Wait, what do you mean, when? You fucking picked that place on purpose! Fils de pute, je ne peux pas le croire!”

She should have seen it coming, really. Bishop was notorious for this kind of inconvenience. Amelie has the utmost respect for his methods and the results he delivered, and she was the only operative in Talon’s ranks that actually wanted to work with him. But this was a step too far.

She’d never been more grateful for the side effects of heart condition.

When her outburst was finished, Bishop said, “I’ll look into it. I’ll call you back later.” He put the phone away and walked out of the building, Amelie’s eyes following as he navigated the office complex, noting already where the stairwells were. He stepped out the front door, ambient noise bleeding through much more prominent at street level. Even at this time of day, cars were scarce, and would be for as much as another hour. That was when the mission officially started, but in the meantime, there was preparation.

Hawk eyed, she watched him point to the right. “Parking garage is over there. It’s empty right now, from what I could see. If you want a better look, you’re the one on the rooftops.” Bishop tilted his head upwards. The buildings all along the street were lined with security cameras, and he was standing directly underneath one of them. He crossed the street, out of her field of view.

Footsteps on stone told her he was going somewhere. Amelie spoke up, “I’m sorry about that. It won’t happen again.” He was, technically, her commanding officer on this mission, and blowing up like that was unacceptable in Talon’s eyes. But even though here, she was Talon’s eyes, that didn’t lessen the severity of what she did, because there might have been someone watching.

Suddenly, after a sharp rustling sound, the line went silent. Bishop was walking to the right, towards the low rising sun, and, Amelie recalled, towards the red circles on the map. She figured he was getting something to eat.

Until the line clicked on again, Amelie examined her surroundings, the rooftops of Munich. From her perspective facing the United Nations office complex, there was a five story high building immediately to her right, and another building of six floors to the left. Buildings B and C, respectively, she decided, with A being her own. The UN building was the width of all three combined.

As the sky filled with blue, she took the map out of bag and unfolded it. She looked around, up and down form the map as she tried to position herself on it. Amelie let go of one end of the map to reach down for her scope. Fluttering in the wind, it eventually fell and swept the white bishop off the parapet and tumbling down onto the pavement below. Grumbling, she lifted the scope to her eye and looked left, to the street signs at the crossing.

Behind her, someone was coming up the stairs. She quickly knelt down, dropped sight from her hand onto the leather bag to fold up the map faster and stuff it back inside. She kept one hand on the rifle, and one ear trained on the door as it opened.

In a flash, she had her weapon trained on the doorway. Bishop was holding out a cup of coffee. “Good instincts, awareness,” he said, walking out to set the cup near her, as he drank from his own. Amelie put the gun down, back in its casing. The door slammed shut on its own. “Janos didn’t call in.”

“Is that a good thing or a bad thing?” Amelie asked.

Meszaros Janos was the United Nations ambassador from Hungary. Prior to taking that post, he worked in municipal engineering in Szeged near the Serbian border, and in intelligence in Budapest. On his own merits, he became a low ranking official and a known quantity in Hungary, and he was promoted to ambassador just last year, filling in for the old ambassador who had mysteriously died.

_C'est un vrai mystère pour sûr_ , Amelie thought. But whatever mystery there was in the assassination of one ambassador to be replaced by another, there was a chance it had been solved. In his time in intelligence, Janos had stumbled upon a collective of otherwise lone wolves that would eventually become Talon. As she remembered from the file, he was more cooperative than other intelligence agencies. His contact with Talon ended, unlike everyone else’s, positively.

“It could be either,” Bishop said, taking a sip and waiting for Amelie to do the same. “It could be nothing at all. I didn’t tell him to check in when he left, so it would have been his choice anyway. But since the best case scenario is that things just go according to plan…”

“Then we assume it’s a bad sign,” she understood. Bishop nodded. “And plan from there.” And the worst case scenario was that he’d been discovered in some way. Right now, it wasn’t so important whether the Hungarians and the UN knew he was connected to Talon or to some other so called terrorist group. A more important concern was broader than that. “So, say he’s not coming. Why?”

“There are a few reasons,” Bishop said. “He could have been detained, and is now under surveillance. It’d be a bad idea to make contact under those circumstances. That said if the situation’s desperate, he might call anyway. He also could have sold us out. I don’t know exactly who he’d bargain with for that, but it’s possible. In this case, of course there’s no warning coming, but the heads have known Janos for a while now, and word is they’re pretty sure the guy’s not a rat.” His eyes flickered around, up to the sky, deep in thought. “He could also just be sick,” he muttered. “And all of this is assuming, of course, that something’s happened to him.”

“Of course,” Amelie echoed, setting her paper cup on the cement, steady against the rooftop winds.

“You know what you’re looking for?” As long as he was here, he simply wanted confirmation. Amelie was diligent, but over time, she also grew confident in the tradecraft. There were benefits to that, but it came with the risks that they might not see eye to eye on some details of the mission.

“Of course,” she said again. He was looking past her, to the sun in the sky. Amelie turned, following his sight line to see the morning was underway. Nine AM must have been drawing near. Bringing her head back and reaching for the cup again, she drank bottoms up, and filled her cold physiology with heat. “Thanks,” she said, “and, uh, sorry about talking out of line regarding the motel.”

“Are you still having nightmares?” Bishop asked rapidly. There was something he knew that she didn’t.

“Today,” Amelie nodded.

“What was it about?”

She stretched out her arm, turned it over to show him the tattoo, right up in her handler’s face so he couldn’t miss it. “Your idea,” she said, “to help me forget this stuff.”

Bishop shrugged. “Forget I asked, then.” Finishing his coffee, he tossed her the empty paper cup. He stood at the roof access door, about to go back down the stairwell, when he had one last thing to say. “Some things, you fight for. Others, you compromise. I hope this makes up for the cold shower. We’re starting soon.”

As the morning sun touched her skin and the warmth of the coffee spread, Amelie held her rifle scope close to her chest. She watched over the roof’s edge, seeing all the German cars zooming by over the German road. From this high, the people on the ground looked small.

With two empty coffee cups laying strewn on the rooftop, the first cars pulled into the parking garage a little to the right. She shifted her body, a better angle to observe the UN operatives between the garage booth and the office complex door. Among them, there was a woman she recognized, but didn’t know from where. She had light brown hair, and through the scope, Amelie could see familiar French facial characteristics. Something clicked, and she definitely knew the woman at one time or another.

It felt like seeing someone from another life, like knowing that she knew, but didn’t. A name popped into her mind. _Claire._ An old friend, maybe, one she met and left on her own, before joining Talon. Amelie wondered if Bishop or any of his superiors knew about this, figuring that they must. But there was nothing in the files about a brunette from her past.

Yet there she was.

A woman that towered over the brunette tapped her on the shoulder from behind. They talked for some short time outside the door as Amelie looked them over. The taller woman looked like she didn’t quite belong with the United Nations staff, but not exactly out of place either. Fair enough, Amelie supposed, since that summed up her position, too. _Pas exactement hors de propos_.

She could sense it coming the moment the brunette entered the building, that the taller, dirty blonde would turn her head to the rooftops. Amelie ducked behind the parapet, out of sight. A waiting game, of sorts, it told her the other woman was some kind of agent.

“Excuse me,” Amelie heard Bishop say. She heard a thud, and the friction of cloth on cloth.

“Sorry, I didn’t see you there,” a Dutch sounding woman’s voice replied. Hardened leather clattered against stone and steel through Amelie’s earpiece. She was coming up the stairs to search the roof.

“Are you looking for something?” Bishop shouted up the stairwell.

Quiet due to distance from the microphone in Bishop’s pocket, but with some certain intensity nonetheless, the Dutch woman said, “I think I left something on the rooftop yesterday.”

“I was just up there, I didn’t see anything,” Bishop said. The footsteps on the staircase stopped. Amelie packed up her things and put on the left hand gauntlet, which had a grappling hook built into it. High power launcher, high tension line, she looked to Building B, tossing the empty coffee cups down into the alley below. Three steps back from the edge, she fired, and metal fibers whooshed through the cool air of winter as the hook connected to the lower roof of the right hand building.

The Dutch woman muttered something faintly audible but incomprehensible, if it was even a word at all. She tapped softly on the railings. Her tone seemed to change, “Well, I hope it turns up somewhere.” Her next steps were slow, a crescendo as she passed Bishop by. “Thanks for sparing me the walk up and down, I guess.”

“You’re welcome,” he said. Amelie was walking down the stairwell of the adjacent building, her equipment bag strapped around her right arm, grapple wire retracted.

From the street, she could see the trickle of cars into the parking garage taper off, and the tall blonde passed her without so much as a glance, coming out of Building A. Amelie studied her look in the brief up close look she got, and in short time, began walking back to her car. Meszaros Janos had not shown up. And as she went back, she had just one thing to say to her handler. “Flirt.” Bishop didn’t respond.

* * *

(A bar; Munich, Germany)

At a low table in the middle of the open floor, a hard leather bag lay flat between the legs of a chair and the legs of a woman. Vapors and the smell of alcohol stains filled the air, and the blue skinned woman in the middle of the room could sense that something was weird about it, but not exactly what. As the inklings from her nose pestered her, she sat, waited, and watched.

There were two women sitting at the bar. Amelie remembered them from scouting the UN building, one dirty blonde, the other brunette. The blonde, the Dutch woman, held a cell phone close and spoke in a hush. The other girl didn’t seem to mind, or didn’t care, and trying to read their motions, Amelie couldn’t sense any immediate caution against eavesdropping. _Une certaine prudence latente peut être_ , she said to herself.

At any rate, she couldn’t hear the conversation from this away and getting closer would certainly provoke caution. Amelie hadn’t signaled herself as a threat yet, and she intended to keep it that way. But she tried nonetheless to figure out how differently they would act if she had, if, between them, it was open information. She tried to think whether they would even be here if they knew who she was, and what she did. _Et s'ils pensent que je ne sais pas?_ She considered the possibility. Perhaps the signals they were looking for and the signals she was trained to catch weren’t the same. _Comment agiraient-ils dans ce cas?_

The brunette was shifting, like she could feel Amelie’s eyes on her back, and she turned her head. Amelie smiled, and moments later, the other woman turned away again, her face inscrutable. Amelie looked back down at the half full glass of sauvignon blanc. Her hand wandered down to her pocket with her wallet and keys in it, and she wondered why she even ordered the drink. And she thought about the smile she gave the brunette, how much of it was deliberate, and how much subconscious.

Amelie looked back to the bar, only shifting her eyes this time, which honed in on the shorter woman’s hair. It was light brown, ash or oak, maybe, and she’d seen it before, a long time ago. To see it again, like a murky, half-forgotten dream, it drew her attention. And just as the rest of the bar seemed to fade, and as she started to see back in time, the phone in her pocket buzzed, and reality snapped back into view.

Tearing her eyes away, Amelie took the phone out and laid it on the table.

‘3 minutes out’

She started counting time, watching the door, cleared her mind, and listened for her heartbeat.

_Thump._

_Un._

_Deux._

_Trois._

_Thump._

_Quatre…_

Something built up in her as she counted, waited. When Bishop finally arrived, exactly on the count of _cent quatre-vingts_ , Amelie realized it was envy. It was his timing. He carried a binder in one hand and some small object in his other. Setting the binder on the table, he pushed it over to her, and Amelie lifted her glass out of the way. Bishop held his over hand over the hardwood surface, loosening his grip bit by bit.

Little white plastic shards poured out.

“Accidents happen,” Bishop said as he sat down. He swept the fragments aside, jagged bits on the floor, and produced another bishop, a black one this time, from his pocket, and stood it on the table.

Amelie eyed it as he pushed it to her side as well. “How many of those do you have?” Lots, she knew, and wasn’t really expecting an answer. She put the glass of white wine down again, and turned the binder to face her. “Your girlfriend’s over there,” she nodded towards the bar seats. “Brunette next to her works for the UN.”

Bishop looked toward them briefly then turned his head back. “How long have they been there?” he asked.

“Almost as long as I have,” she said. Amelie forgot how long she’d been here. “I saw them come in.”

“So they saw you.” It wasn’t a good or bad thing in and of itself, and his tone didn’t hint one way or the other. It was a matter of fact, and the fact was they saw her. Bishop didn’t need her to say, and he deduced from her silence that their seeing her didn’t change things much. “First things first, our guy didn’t show. What do we make of this?”

“Nothing good,” Amelie said. The original plan called for Janos to bring a few very sensitive documents to work, fork over the key to his office, and then Amelie would go in at night to pick it up. It was a dead drop with flair. That plan wouldn’t work anymore. “But that’s what backup plans are for. So,” Bishop’s gesture indicated the binder, and Amelie opened it. There was a map inside, one floor plan, an electric heat map, and a reverse engineered electric plan. The offices were all labeled, and Meszaros Janos was missing.

“Optimistically, you’re going in uninvited.” It was a simple switch, a key for a lock pick, a person who should be there for a person who should not. It was hopeful. “Pessimistically, our delivery’s canceled and we have to pick it up ourselves.”

“And have words with notre gars,” Amelie added.

“Yeah,” Bishop said, “Words.” Neither of them sounded sold on that line of action. But if it was necessary, if they could be sure it was necessary, then it’d be easy. And words could mean several things. Talon was flexible about these operations and what they entailed.

He looked to the side and she followed. At the bar, the brunette was leaning in, definitely whispering. “Do you think they’re talking about us?” Bishop asked.

“I can’t hear them, don’t think they can hear us.”

“Then what else is she whispering about?” Bishop pointed vaguely towards the woman with the light brown hair. Amelie looked away. They could be talking about anything. Besides, even if they could, that was what the code was for. “Well, there’s no hiding from this now. Either he’s got the thing here or he doesn’t. Which assumption are we working under?”

There were ways Janos could have gotten the papers to the UN office without coming himself. He could have put it with his intelligence report on the Balkan region, and whoever came in his place would have to bring it. Amelie scanned for Hungarian sounding names, thinking he could have always meant to send it through another UN agent, or staffer, and she was meant to infiltrate their office instead of his. She considered that plan, how much better, or at least less disastrous it looked for a lower ranking person having their office invaded, secret files stolen from someone who didn’t technically have it in the first place. There were ways, she thought. “He’s got it.”

Bishop cleared his throat. Amelie traced his sightline back to the bar, to the Dutch woman. And she shifted her gaze, just a little to the left. Her eyes snapped back to her handler, who turned back to face her himself. “In whose office?” he said.

Her finger slid over the paper, slowing to a stop over the four names she could identify as Hungarian.

‘Laszlo Kalman’

‘Erik Pataki’

‘Elizabet Szoke’

‘Farago Bognar’

She looked up and saw Bishop looking down. “What’s he doing here?” she asked about the last one.

Farago Bognar was the Defense Minister of Hungary, and a world renowned hero during the Omnic Crisis, holding the line back before Overwatch began to strike back. Amelie had only been three years old at the time everything started, and it’d been twenty years since she last heard his name under the title of General, but she never forgot. A man like that, nobody could forget. And now, here he was.

“Taking our guy’s place,” Bishop said. He thought for a moment, and then leaned in, spoke softer. “He might be here to share with the UN information that Janos, as an ambassador, wouldn’t have. Or he might just be filling in.” Either way, his presence changed the situation, and if they weren’t already since this morning, soon Amelie and Bishop would come under close scrutiny. “His office could be worth raiding, even just for his own documents, but it’s isolated.” If time became a factor, she’d have to choose between it and the other three.

Of course, time was always a factor.

“Which leads us to the electrical plans,” Bishop went on. Amelie flipped to it. The bright spots on the heat map were spots of resistance, lights, cameras, and some other things here and there. Mostly, it was lights and cameras, and it was her job overnight to find the security cameras and their fields of view. “This is a three source circuit. I can only provide you one EMP, and it’ll be a big one. Use it wisely.”

Amelie stared at him, baffled every occasional glance back down she took. “I can’t do this one alone, Bishop. This,” she waved her hands over the tangle of wires on the paper, “This isn’t my thing.”

“Use your resources,” he told her simply, “Professor.” Bishop nodded towards her right pocket.

Reaching inside, Amelie took out the ID card, looked at it. She faintly remembered her university days, back in Paris, but a long way from home. Her mind turned to someone she met there, someone with light brown hair, shrouded in mental fog. Amelie gazed over to the bar again. _Je sais que je vous ai rencontré avant_.

The man across the table leaned back, and his eyes darted in thought. “Why do you think he couldn’t make it?” Amelie couldn’t tell how much of a question that really was, and how much he was suggesting they pay Janos a visit in Budapest. It would be a detour. It would take time, time that they already didn’t have, and certainly wouldn’t get any more of.

“One step at a time,” Amelie said, tapping on the contents of the binder. “We handle this, and whatever follows this. Then we handle him.”

Glancing over to the women at the bar again, Bishop agreed, “That works.” The brunette got up to leave, but the blonde stayed. He eyed Amelie’s half glass of wine, and reached out to take it, pulling it towards himself. As he stood up, he tapped his ear and pointed to the black chess piece, and he took the glass and headed to the bar.

Amelie tipped the black bishop over and heard something rattle inside. She peeled off the felt underneath and found a small earpiece inside the hollow dark plastic shell. Amelie planted the device in her ear, tucked the binder shut, grabbed it by the spine and her bag by the strap, and got up to leave.

* * *

(A parking lot; Munich, Germany)

The glow from the shaped lightbulbs of the OPEN sign reached barely halfway across the street. The winter night of Munich was windy and cold and dulled as she was to it, Amelie could still feel it, the chill against her skin, if only just. _Il doit être proche de la congelation_ , she thought.

She walked under the light of tall street lamps, binder clutched between her arm and torso side. The plastic in her pocket bit into her skin, barely tangible. She was making her way to her car when she saw someone looking her way. First, Amelie checked over her shoulder, maybe the woman was just looking past her, but there was no one behind.

In the lonely light of the lamp post, she could see the woman had brown hair, and she could see it was the same person from back inside, sitting on the left. She was dressed lightly, not as light as Amelie herself, but still not nearly heavy enough for this cold. It’d been a few minutes, at most, and it couldn’t have been comfortable to stand there. She was standing there for a reason.

Through her earpiece, she heard glass clink against wood, and the creak of a high risen chair. “Hello, again,” Bishop said. Amelie stopped in her tracks, and shifted the strap of her rifle bag from her hand up to her right shoulder.

“Well, well. Fancy meeting you here,” the Dutch woman said. She paused. “No thanks.”

“It came like that,” Bishop said. They were talking about the sauvignon blanc. Amelie tugged on the strap to test that the bag wouldn’t slip, and satisfied, she went on. The low heels of her shoes clicked against the asphalt, which soon alerted the brunette at the light post. “It’s nice running into you again. My name is Ethan.”

_Really?_ Amelie wondered. From the time it took the Dutch woman to answer, it seemed she didn’t believe it either. “Vera,” she eventually said. “And if it came like that, you might want your money back.”

She heard Bishop chuckling, “I don’t think bars do that.” She heard Vera snort as well.

Approaching the brunette, her mind kept telling her, _Claire_. Every step she took, she was asking herself the question, really two questions, _Comment puis-je savoir cela?_ and _Comment puis-je savoir cela?_ For the first one, the answer was easy. She didn’t, and when they started talking, it would have to appear that way. But to the second one, Amelie didn’t have an answer, didn’t know how she knew.

She just knew.

Squeezing her binder tight, Amelie reached out with her right hand. “Bonsoir,” she said, and she followed Claire’s eyes down. She slowly reached out her hand and well, and they shook. Amelie could feel the warmth of the other girl’s skin and blood, warmth that no longer pumped through her own veins.

The two women under the light post scanned each other, both trained to look for threats. Neither found any, though that put one more at ease than the other. From her face as the eyes settled, Amelie couldn’t say how on edge the other was. “Thanks,” she heard Vera say through the earpiece, “but, no. I’m still busy tonight. And I still owe you.”

Amelie walked around her, turned her back to lean against the pole. The brunette stepped some centimeters over to make space. “You’re from France, too, aren’t you?” she asked. Her long breath condensed in the January cold, under the light of the streetlamp. “It’s nice to finally see another French face here. Tu sais, prend un pour en connaître un,” she said, laughing softly, beautifully.

“Vrai,” Amelie nodded. “Prend un pour en connaître un.” She turned her head left. In the lamp’s light, the other woman’s light brown hair looked almost golden, and when she blinked, Amelie saw flashes of the twilight sun, the rolling hills and flower fields. “Where, exactly?” she asked.

“Annecy,” the brunette said. “I’m from Annecy.”

“I’m sorry,” Bishop was saying back inside the bar, “just thinking about where we bumped into each other.”

“I work in security,” Vera told him. “That’s all I can say.” Amelie suppressed the urge to huff and roll her eyes. Honestly, she wondered how much longer the two of them could keep it up, telling blank faced lies before getting tired of hearing them. She wondered if Vera and Bishop were just trying to confuse one another. _Ils sont parfaits l'un pour l'autre_.

Amelie imagined Bishop was taking all of this with a straight face. “Sounds cooler than my job already,” he said. “I manage the building, and a few others. It’s not that involved.”

“But it brings you to the roof,” Vera pointed out.

It would have been so easy right then to say she was from Annecy too, to drop the masks and open up everything she knew about herself. But she had a job to do. “What brings you out here?” Amelie asked.

“I could ask you the same,” Claire said. “I’ve been in Munich so long; I thought I’d never hear a word of French again. But here you are.” She turned her head back, eyes mischievously glistening under the tall light. “What brought you here?”

“Work,” it could bring anyone anywhere. “At LMU,” Amelie said, “not tenured, but, maybe one day. What about you? Work, I assume?”

“What did you leave up there, anyway?” Bishop asked. Amelie watched the subtleties and shifts in Claire’s face, and she let her right hand drop down by her side. The two studied each other, fast in the moments between question and answer.

“A tool box,” Vera told him. “Just generic stuff, nothing I can’t replace, and maybe one of my coworkers found it already. If so, they haven’t told me. It’s not so important, I just,” she trailed off. Amelie faintly smiled. Perhaps Bishop was taking this flirting thing seriously, and touching her shoulder.

“I get it,” he said. The chair creaked again as Bishop stood up. “I’d best get going.”

Under the light post, Claire was nodding. “Work,” she muttered quietly. She drew a long breath in. “I’m looking for someone.”

“You’re an investigator?” Amelie asked, spit balling mostly. From a certain point of view, the United Nations did deal in investigations. The look on the opposite woman’s face said as much, that she wasn’t really a detective, but was something close.

“It’s not really related to work,” she sighed, “at least, I don’t think it is. I hope it isn’t,” she added. “She’s an old friend of mine. I’ve been searching for her for a while.” There was something in her tone, some longing or sadness. There was also something else, a red flag in this line of work to break off the conversation. That was what protocol would dictate, but Amelie wasn’t a slave to the rules. And bending them, that was why she was here.

“How long have you been looking?” she asked. The thought that Claire was looking for her crept up on her, and the number of two years floated in her mind. It seemed a sensible enough timeframe and it was when everything else in her life changed, when everything else went dark. But gazing into this woman’s eyes, she realized she knew her from before the changes, from her old life. Before Talon.

She looked up and closed her eyes. “Eight years,” she said. “Eight years without a trace.”

It resonated with Amelie. She would have been seventeen, then, still in Annecy herself but just about to leave. It was strange to think of herself as having disappeared, but then again, she had. She did, two years ago, but not eight, as far as she could remember. It resonated with her, and Amelie said something she shouldn’t have. “Maybe I can help you find her.”

Claire’s face, pale in the frigid night, lit up when she heard it. The shimmer in her eyes said all they needed to, though it faded fast. “It’s funny,” she said, letting out another long, warm breath that glistened in the shadow. “She looked a lot like you.” Claire looked away, deep in thought. “She was...”

“She must have meant a lot to you,” Amelie reflected on their past relationship. Her thoughts wandered around the hilltops, the solstices, and the sunsets she used to sit and watch.

“She still does.”

“What was her name?” Amelie asked, sure by now that she already knew. “If I’m going to help you track her down, I need somewhere to start.”

And sure enough, the brunette said, “Amelie. Honestly, I just want to know if she’s still waiting for me. I made her a promise, a long time ago, before we parted ways. I promised her that if she waited, I’d find her.” Claire paused. “It didn’t mean she had to take me back. I just want to see her again. I just want to know whether she’s still waiting for me.”

Her grip on the binder tightened, and she scanned the other woman’s body language as best she could. Amelie was looking for an angle, a reason to even have this conversation, because as much as they both might have wanted to, and as much as they might have wanted to pretend, Claire was a United Nations agent. She considered what she heard, how much of it was real, how much of it was fake, how much she already knew, and how much she just now learned. “I’ll keep an eye out,” she said. “I’m sure you’ll see her again.”

“I wish I could be so certain,” Claire lamented. She lifted herself off the light post, “It’s getting late.” Amelie nodded, leaving the spotlight herself. It was a long minute, watching Amelie vanish into the shroud of night. She trained her eyes on the blue woman, all the way to her car in the distant dark. She took her phone out of her pocket, made a call, held it close. “Blue BMW with wheels, three series, license plate M-LP-0501, it’s the blue woman, from this morning.”

“Got it,” Vera replied. The roar of an engine burning in pursuit bled through the phone line.

“This better be enough,” Claire said.

“When it ends,” her Dutch accent was sharp as the wind and cold as the night. “And it will.” As the breeze settled down, two cars pulled out of the parking lot. Claire stood watching, pocketed her phone as sleek, dark silver engaged its pursuit.

* * *

(A motel; Munich, Germany)

As blue steel pulled to a stop in the parking space outside the motel, and the engine sputtered to silence, Amelie looked again across all three mirrors. The high beam shine of headlights was fresh in her mind. Someone was tailing her, probably the Dutch woman from the stairwell and the bar, Vera. The question quickly became who she was working for, if it wasn’t the United Nations.

She pulled away from her follower, was allowed to pull away. Amelie recognized this technique, and grabbing the strap of her rifle bag from the passenger seat and the binder from the glove box, she considered donning the visor helmet and scanning for the pursuit car. She pulled the handle of the door and got out, shaking her head on her way back to the lobby. _Pas de sens attirer son attention_.

She walked past the receptionist with a faint smile, and picked the key out of her pocket on her way back to room nine. The chain lock slid shut, and its steel links dangled and banged on the wooden door. Amelie turned on the lights and pulled off her leather boots, throwing them near the closet.

After dropping off her equipment on the bed, she placed the files on the desk looked for her journal underneath. There was a lot to think about, and keeping an eye on the window didn’t help.

They were flirting with danger, she and Bishop both. At first blush, it seemed they didn't learn much, but their stunt at the bar did create certainty. The two Talon operatives could now be certain the United Nations was looking for them, and be certainly the ones to look for. The inevitable happened, and the circumstances of the mission changed, but it wasn't by itself better or worse than before. It was up to Amelie to adapt.

She undid the clasps that held the window curtains off to the side, and let them fall. The hem of the curtains didn’t reach the windowsill, and Amelie laid her hand down on the cool wood, thumb reaching up to the cloth. She pressed the sides of her fingertips to the glass before kneeling down to peer outside through the narrow slit. From the outside looking in, though, there was very little to see. _Très peu mais pas ne rien_ , she reminded herself.

Back in her desk chair, she held her hands over the file and the journal like a set of scales. Sooner or later, Amelie would have to make a choice, and forefront in her mind, she knew she had to read through Bishop’s file to prepare for tomorrow’s step of the mission. On the other hand, she couldn’t stop thinking about Claire, what she said, how she knew her, and how well. Her thumb creeped to the edge of the cover of the journal and hooked underneath.

“Il n'y a pas d'éviter cela, n'est-ce pas?” she sighed. She resigned herself to remembering instead of planning, and flipped through the pages, subconsciously looking for a single signal word: ‘Promise.’

Amelie found it, the last, most recent entry before the spaces went blank. There was rain and there was sunset. There was a figure beside herself had light brown hair, and a promise made in an uncertain dialogue. Each line’s speaker was unclear, she should have noted it when she still remembered, but it read like a back and forth.

‘Je suis désolé, je suis en retard’

‘Ne vous en faites pas’

‘Je suis juste content que tu sois là’

‘J'avais peur de manquer ça’

‘Vous êtes ici maintenant

‘Combien de temps allez-vous être allé?’

‘Quelques années au moins’

‘Mais je reviendrai tout de suite’

‘Vous n'avez pas à faire ça pour moi’

‘Je pourrais avoir à le faire pour moi’

‘Vis ta vie’

‘Attends-moi, et je te promets de te trouver’

_Je t'aime_ , Amelie thought she remembered hearing next. Her hand held the tip of a pen close to the page, hovered and shook before her eyes snapped to it and she pulled herself away. She put the pen down, with a heavy crack, and brushed it aside. These records had to be permanent, and pure.

Because if she could change them, so could anyone else.

As she shut the covers of the journal and tucked it back beneath the desk, and as she reached for the file to get to work, the phone rang. Amelie let it ring to the message taker, warily watching it and the dark of the outside through the little bit of exposed window, but it was too dark out and too bright in to see.

The night receptionist said, “Mrs. Tremblay, someone is calling for your room.” Amelie kneeled down by the window, shook her hair loose and held it up behind her like a curtain all her own. Dimming the room behind her, she peered out to see a small, blinking light in a car in the parking spaces. The car looked some shade or another of gray, and there was only one person inside.

The receptionist continued, “I’ll tell her that you’re not here.” She sounded cautious, nervous, like violence was about to break out, and it might. The line clicked, and Amelie kept watch outside, counting the time until the blinking light shifted and brightened, more exposed. The rearview mirror in the car was out of alignment. She looked just off to the left, and saw her own car in the adjacent space.

Shadows shifted through the light of the screen, thin but projected large on the clothed ceiling of the car. It was tapping on a keypad, and it was the woman inside dialing a number. Amelie’s eyes flicked to the landline next to her, and then returned to the night shrouded car.

The light flattened against an away facing surface, probably going back up to her ears. Waiting, expecting, she looked at the motel phone again. But it was nothing, and in a few minutes, the light went dark.

And then the call came.

It wasn’t the receptionist, not the Dutch voice she heard over the wire that day, but a third voice on the speaker. It was Claire. “Amelie? Are you there?” Her ears perked up. “Please pick up. I want to talk. We haven’t seen each other in a while.”

Some questions rose in her head, the most immediate of which was how long “a while” was. They didn’t exchange numbers, and they didn’t even trade names. Amelie certainly hadn’t told Claire where she was staying, but had a good idea how she found out.

Her eyes flickered at her rifle. Her hand crept up the glass to the latch that kept it shut. Part of her figured the mission was never going to end quietly, and that now was as good a time to starting running and hiding as any other, but there was nowhere to run, and there was nowhere to hide yet. And more than that, if Amelie opened fire, cut the head off the job right now, there was nowhere else to go.

_If not now, though, then when would I pull the trigger?_

Something had to give. Either Claire had to stop calling, or Amelie had to pick up and start talking. And maybe it occurred to her that was all that the UN agent wanted, an open dialogue with an old, half remembered friend. Or maybe, as her time as the Widowmaker had taught her, there really was something else going on, because there always was. She peered into the night again, the black sky covering the dark silver car that followed her here, no lights inside, and shadows still.

She was waiting for something. Amelie pulled the latch unlocked and lifted the window open by just a sliver, just enough to hear through, and she picked up the phone. A long silence fell, white noise permeated through both sides.

“Who is this?” Amelie asked, focused entirely on the outside. No activity, no response, but there was a suspicion mounting. She spoke again, “Hello? Who is this?”

A faint click, and softly crying on the other side, the other woman replied, “It’s Claire. It’s so good to hear your voice again, Amelie. Do you remember me?” She thought she did, but couldn’t call the memories to mind now. _Do you remember me?_ It echoed and it resonated inside her, deeper in pitch before but now a chorus of man and woman both.

Involuntarily, her eyes shut, and from the deepest pits of her brain, she heard the screams of birds a split second at a time. “Yes,” Amelie answered, knowing the question crystal clear, but by now already forgetting its context. By now, all she saw was a painful searing on her eyelids pulled tight.

“Are you okay?” Claire’s voice sounded different. It came across more natural and genuine now than moments before. It was subtle, but it was a kind of subtle Amelie knew how to decode, whether from her time with Talon or before.

“Oui,” she said, “I’m fine.”

“I thought you had moved on,” Claire said to her. “Maybe I was wrong to expect you to hold on to me for so long, but when you left for Paris, I thought it was only temporary. I stalled myself, thinking I’d always have time, but I could never forget what I told you, that one day I’d come back for you, if you were still waiting for me.”

_Attends-moi, et je te promets de te trouver_ , Amelie thought of again. _Je t'aime_. It was coming back, the vision of the sunset on the hill. It bounded on one end whatever memories she lost from Paris, and the cacophony bounded it on the other.

“Times change,” Claire said, “And we change with them.” She was crying, and trying to keep it in to some small success. But it was still easy to pick out, why, Amelie didn’t know, but suspected she was learning by the second. “You’ve been through a lot. I’d never ask you to take all those years back from yourself. And if I’m wrong about this, then I’ll accept being wrong, but I don’t think you’re in a good place right now. You can move back, or you can move forward, but you can’t stay like this. It doesn’t have to be with me, not if you don’t want to.”

“Claire,” Amelie said. “Thank you, for what you’re trying to do. But I’m fine.”

The line went silent.

From outside, through the chilling slat open air, came the sound of a door slamming shut. Amelie looked out the window to the parking lot. Her tail drove away.

Amelie made a note to herself to review the UN office plans and diagrams in the morning and to get them checked out at LMU during the day. For now, she was too shaken by some little thing she heard on the phone. _Do you remember me?_ It bore on her, and she didn’t know why. Perhaps by morning, she would.

Whatever nightmare that had to be.

She shut the window, clicked off the lights, and dug into her rifle bag reaching inside on instinct alone. Amelie took out the photograph. Holding it high, she set it down on the nightstand, slowly, as she closed her eyes.

* * *

(Somewhere in Europe; years ago)

_What is your line of work?_

Hunched over as far as she could against the bindings that held her to the simple metal chair, Amelie hazily watched drops of blood from her ripped open forehead splatter on the gray steel floor. Standing in front of her, arm outstretched holding a strip of red smeared gauze, her husband towered over her. Maybe her husband, maybe not, she couldn’t really tell, whether that was because of the drugs in her system or not.

His shape was the same. His face was the same. His voice was the same. As best as she could remember, on their more passionate nights, his touch was the same. But this was not one of those nights, this was a different night, and the heat bearing on her skin was dry, mechanical, sterile. Was it possible, she thought, for her dear Gerard to be so cruel, even against her, even if he wanted, or even if he didn’t?

Was it possible that he was always cruel?

The man’s hand dropped the blood drenched gauze strip and came close to Amelie’s face reaching for another when she yelped, “I’m a dancer.” Eyes opened wide, her breath shook as the silhouetted hand halted, and as it continued, and as it clinched another piece of the tape stuck to her flesh and ripped it off like it was nothing.

As the shock dulled and the immediate pain faded, Amelie felt only two more strips covering her face. Two more times, she’d go through this before whatever else her torturer had prepared. “Do you know why you are here?” he asked her.

She didn’t even know where here was, and she certainly didn’t dare ask, only looked up and shook her head. The man tore off the penultimate gauze cover and Amelie slammed her eyes shut, threw herself back against the chair’s backboard and to the ground with a loud clatter. The edge of the seat, bent over, bit into the back of her legs whose ends dangled over the end between the chair legs.

Her weight was crushing her arms.

The man left the room to go get something while Amelie, his captive, squirmed and writhed on the floor again. Clarity was coming back to her, the chemicals she’d been drugged with were wearing off, and she was starting to truly think again. Gerard had been in danger for the better part of three years, and whoever was trying to kill him then could doubtlessly come after her, too. Her present predicament could be the work of any number of people, not the least of which were Gerard’s mystery employers.

He found something, a secret that kept getting worse the more he looked, and it seemed easy to judge that it was the secret trying constantly to kill him to keep itself.

But he never told her what it was. He never told Amelie anything about his job other than the most basic, undeniable facts, but maybe even those had been a deception, all to keep a secret. But if he was so tight lipped, it made no sense to her that he had to be killed to hide anything at all, because alive, he could hide it better.

If it was a secret trying to kill him, then Gerard was fighting it wrong. He should have told her who he worked with, he should have told her what he found, and she should have spread it wherever she could. And if it wasn’t a secret, it was a person, or a group, and he had foiled them many times. So many that they now came after his wholly unprepared wife, in a moment of failed vigilance.

If it was a group, it was a terrifying group. And if they had found her, and come to take her in the night, it was because they found her first. Before who, she couldn’t tell, only that in the good grace of the world, there had to have been someone to safeguard the house, only they didn’t know there was anything to watch over. Maybe in hunting one secret, Gerard kept her a secret from the wrong people. And maybe, in fear, he kept it from everyone, but it was the nature of secrets to eventually be found.

Or worst of all, it was all a hoax, and all his injuries, even if they were real, were staged. To what end, she couldn’t possibly know. Amelie knew only, in this case, that as peace loving as she was, she wanted revenge.

When the man returned, he set a bucket on the table and water spilled over the side of it. He took one look at her and saw the change in Amelie’s visage, and made a note of it in his notepad, snorting while he did it. He set the notepad down again and walked over to her, feet by the side of her head. Content to stare at her straining face for a short while, listening for the crunching sound of snapping bones, he finally pulled up the chair as Amelie was crying out in pain.

He slid behind and pushed the chair to the table, and Amelie slumped over, her eyes tossed around. Blinking twice, and three times, regaining her bearings she looked at the notepad to see only illegible shorthand.

She squealed. The torturer yanked her up by the hair and moved the bucket right in front of her, her facing it directly. The message couldn’t be clearer. “When did you meet Gerard?” the man asked with the palm of his hand pressed on the back of Amelie’s head.

She could fight him on this. She could have fought him on anything, and lost, every time. But as long as she could think straight, Amelie would try to think through this. Whether he’d push her under or not, whether or not she’d suffer, it wasn’t in her hands. And even if he’d give his word one way or the other, it wasn’t worth anything.

There was no more air around her mouth or nose, only near freezing cold water. It blasted the thoughts out of her head, and all Amelie could do was struggle to keep her little breath of air and push back, to no avail. The hand was too heavy and the man too strong.

Oxygen seeped out of her lungs, escaped her mouth and bubbled to the thinly exposed surface of the water. Cognitively, it was impossible to tell how close she was to drowning, but instinctively she knew it wasn’t very long. Her chest ached first, then hammered, squeezing itself to find air to circulate, but there was none to be had.

Until the man pulled her out.

Mouth agape, she sucked in the fire from the air, and her voice cracked as she strained to open her eyes. He waved his hand in front of her face, released his iron grip on her hair. “When did you meet Gerard?” he asked again, even toned and calm, relaxed like nothing had just happened. And maybe, truly, nothing had happened.

But whether it was him drowning her or it was nothing at all, it was going to keep happening, of that much, Amelie could be as sure as she could be of anything. “Three years ago,” she choked out, coughing up water that had seeped through her lips.

“What is his line of work?” the man asked. His hand pressed on the back of her head.

“He works in security,” she told him, the honest truth as far as she thought she knew. And then her captor pushed her underwater again, the bloody mix flooding into her throat. The best she knew wasn’t good enough for him. Perhaps nothing would be good enough. The little air in her lungs escaped her, bubbled up and out of the water’s surface and spilling over the side, onto the table and the floor. Amelie started feeling lightheaded, about to blackout, in the slow crawl of time in submersion.

And when at last, she could breathe again, she heard the man behind her ask again, “What is Gerard’s line of work?”

Through sharp, desperate breaths, Amelie said, “I told you, he works in security. That’s all I know. I swear, that’s all I know.” The bucket water streaming down her face hid it well, but Amelie herself could feel the warm tears creeping down her skin. “I’ll tell you everything, I swear, just please, stop.”

“Why does he come home so late at night?” How could he know that? He’d have to have watched the house, all those nights in question. He’d have to have been there, or sent someone who could stay concealed from Gerard’s paranoid vigilance. He’d had to, because there was only one other explanation.

And she pondered that only alternative, drowning.

* * *

(United Nations office complex; Munich, Germany)

Looking up, over her shoulder and to the left, Vera made her way into the building, past the guards stationed behind the door. They had looks of uneasy understanding on their faces, expecting her to be here, but not wanting it, for whatever reason. Until she reappeared by the upper floor window line, this was all that could be seen from the rooftop of the building opposite the UN office across the street.

On her way upstairs, smiling as she passed by the low ranking clerks and the few secretaries for those important enough to have them, Vera jotted something down on a slip of paper. She handed it off to someone on the far side of the building, knocking on the wall panel beside him, one of the many low ranking clerks. “Do you have a moment?” she asked, just a small thing.

The way he looked at her, he probably thought Vera worked here. The way he looked at her, he probably never talked to anyone that didn’t. And that worked for Vera, and that worked for him. “What do you need?” the clerk said, happy to do a small favor whenever he had the time.

Vera passed him the slip of paper folded up. “Get this to Bognar,” she said. The clerk was a little bit off put, because technically, Farago Bognar didn’t work for the United Nations either, not that he knew Vera didn’t. Few people could get a hold of Bognar, who always seemed to have something important to do, unless he invited them. The clerk could only suppose that he had invited Vera, though that left him still perplexed as to the need for secrecy.

Still, he could comply, and he nodded as he took the note.

“Fast, please,” Vera added. “The sooner the better.”

“I’ll get right on it,” the clerk said, and Vera left, going back the same way she came. She stopped at the stairwell, once again in view of the opposing building’s rooftop, and she glanced that way again, only to see nothing. Her suspicions that the blue woman from the bar yesterday was watching were, for the moment, unfounded.

She went up to the rooftop, in the fresh cold air and sunlight of Munich’s January. Here, again, she looked across the street, and again, she saw nothing out of the ordinary. She stepped a little closer to the edge, looking down onto the sidewalk. Vera walked around the roof, looking over, considering the fire escape ladder on the side of the building. She leaned over the side, and she could see an identical ladder on the other building.

There was an escape route.

From one corner of the rooftop, she watched the movements on the street corner. Her eyes flicked back and forth, between looking for Bognar and looking for an out of place camera that could be watching, and she saw the Defense Minister first. Vera headed down the escape ladder, converging onto the street from the alley and filing in line, some meters behind Bognar on his way to the parking garage.

She tailed him to the stopping point on the inside, on the fourth level. “Is it Ethan or the other one watching?” Bognar asked, looking out the open wall. The way he enunciated the man’s name, it was as obvious to him as it was to her last night that it was fake.

“The other one,” Vera said. “The blue woman.” The Widowmaker, as she didn’t know. “There’s been no sign of ‘Ethan’ since last night.” It was an obvious and thin cover, but for the time being, there was nothing else to call him. “He may be hiding, he might have left, and if he left, then he might come back.”

“Have you seen the security footage in the office?” Vera shook her head, too busy in the field to have done the work of deskbound minds. “You should, when you get the chance. Here,” Bognar took out a scrap of paper from his pocket and signed his name on it. He handed the signed scrap to her. “Go to the security room, get the footage, on my authority. You’ll see a man wandering the offices, identity concealed, but it shouldn’t be hard to guess. Find out what he’s doing.”

Vera took the paper, pocketed it thinking, probably Bishop. “Where’s Claire?” she asked. She hadn’t seen Claire since last night, either, who got in her car and drove east.

Bognar checked the time. “By now, in Budapest. I sent her to check on Meszaros Janos. Hopefully, he’s recovered.” He could see that Vera looked unconvinced.

“He was sick? That’s why he couldn’t be here?”

“He was,” Bognar told her simply. “Is it a good thing he’s not here?”

“Maybe. The blue woman is Amelie Lacroix, wife of Gerard Lacroix.” Vera reached into her jacket and pulled out a recorder, and handed it over. “This is a copy of a voice sample over the phone. If the UN will release any of Lacroix’s phone logs, they should match.”

Bognar nodded as he tucked the recording away. “So the line is Gerard, his wife, the blue woman, Ethan, and what?”

“Talon,” Vera said. “And Janos.” They were all connected.

It was a big claim, which both Bognar and Vera were eminently aware of, but it looked clear to the Minister that she believed it entirely. Supposing it was true, it could be confirmed in Budapest. And supposing it was not, then at least thinking so was of little consequence. The circumstances added up to true, and Bognar accounted them, “Ethan and Blue are here. They’re up to no good. Janos is supposed to be here. What do they want from him?”

“Blackmail?” Vera suggested. Maybe it was a best guess. Maybe it was as close to the truth as she could say. Either way, Bognar didn’t like it. “Access?” Another shot in the dark. “Whatever it is,” she continued, much more gravely, “they think you have it.”

“Why would I have it?” Bognar asked. “I’m filling in for Janos, but I’m not Janos.”

“It could be any number of reasons,” Vera said. “It could be that they’re overthinking things. But it’s what they’re thinking, and it’s what they’re going to act on.” She stepped closer to the concrete edge guard, considering the UN building, its floor plan of offices and cubicles, and as much of its security camera layout as she could remember off the top of her head. “They’re going to break in,” she said.

“Where is the blue woman, anyway?” Bognar asked. “And if she’s not right across the street watching us with her own two eyes, what’s she doing?”

“She’s at the Ludwig Maximilian University, as of an hour ago.” Vera had planted a bug on Amelie’s car. “She was near here earlier, not for very long, and went right to the university after that. As to what she’s doing, it’s a cover identity. Nothing more.”

Bognar didn’t believe in the phrase ‘nothing more.’ It made things seemingly simple, when they could very well be more complex. Whatever Vera’s job was, he expected her to think like that as well. And he had an inkling of an idea what Amelie was doing at LMU. “What if it’s not nothing?” he pondered. “What could it be?” He glanced down to Vera’s pocket. She put her hand over the slip, starting to understand.

“The break in,” she realized. “She’s plotting it there.”

“But covertly. Start looking into that.”

Vera waited two minutes for Bognar to get a head start out of the garage before she left herself, and at the toll barrier, she went the other way to the crosswalk. Crossing by slow traffic, she once again set her sights on the building opposite the United Nations offices, and with a familiar feeling, she barged in the door, only this time, Bishop wasn’t here.

She made her way up the stairs, subconsciously noting that the security cameras lining the stairwell were turned off, and dusty. They hadn’t worked in a long time, too long, at least, to be of any use in her investigations into Bishop and the blue French woman.

As she pushed open the roof access door, she wasn’t sure what she expected. She was greeted with an empty rooftop, a fine view of the UN building on the other side of the street, and the midmorning winter sky. Vera walked up to the parapet, brushed her hand on the stone from one end to the other, and felt only the architecture that had been there for decades, if not centuries. She looked over the edge, down on the street level entrance to the office complex, and right to the entrance of the garage.

She looked up to the third floor of the UN building, where she knew Bognar’s office was, though which office specifically, even she wasn’t sure. They’d gotten mixed up from the original plan, on Bognar’s own insistence, but it seemed everyone inside the building knew, or could find out.

Then she looked behind her, to the pavilion roof structure of the access door, and the shingles that hung just beyond the door frame. Vera walked underneath, looking up, directly into the lens of a rifle scope.

* * *

(A restaurant; Munich, Germany)

A warm plate of German potato salad lay on the table in front of her, pushed a ways in to make room for her binder and operations helmet. The lenses of the helmet were individually detachable, and Amelie had broken off the one coded to watch through the scope of her gun. The scope had been found, much to her irritation, and its intelligence value was now negative. She’d have to get it back, no doubt while under watch herself. But that was an eventual problem.

Her hand slipped back from the spoon, dropping it to the edge of the plate with a little clink, and she reassembled the helmet. No use watching it now that it’d been spotted, and she turned to the binder, opened it up to the blank tracing paper laid over the complicated mess of a diagram she’d gotten for the security camera setup.

In short, there were a lot of cameras, and there was no pattern to their connections to the three major power lines coming in from the outside. It meant she couldn’t blackout any one part of the building, and she’d be dodging fields of view no matter what. The only difference the EMP bomb would make was in the narrowest details of her route.

There was no question which detonation spot would have the most impact, and that was the front. It was split approximately forty-thirty-thirty. The question, in truth, was which forty percent it powered, and whether either of the thirties would clear out a better route. So Amelie got to work with the pen, tracing the lines she’d navigate.

Sheet after sheet, when she completed one, she tore it off and began on the next. Multiple routes, contingency plans, considerations for each bombing location. And every so often, reaching up for a bite of the potato salad, which gradually cooled. After an hour, only half the plate was gone, and she looked up, noticing most of the rest of the establishment was empty. The lunch hour was past.

Her rifle bag lay at her feet, and Amelie kept eating, kept tracing paths, though by now she’d already come up with what she thought was optimal. In truth, it was also the simplest, sticking as close as it could to the front wall, deviating through the floors only once. It was precise, and her next step was to measure it down to the centimeter, to make sure she got it right in the execution.

There were others, not quite so simple, but less tricky to weave through, not quite so tight. Perhaps one of them was preferable, but precise execution was her purpose. It’d be a waste of her talents and training for Amelie to take the easy ways in.

After she’d finished eating, and one of the servers in the restaurant came to take her plate and spoon away to be washed, Amelie filed the route plans back into the binder, and looked outside. It was raining, and she felt a shiver down her spine, not knowing exactly what she remembered about water. She forewent showering that morning, though. There had to be something.

Amelie went up to the cash register. “Excuse me,” she said, “do you happen to have a spare umbrella?” She nodded behind her, and she could see the cashier’s eye line pointing to the rain. “I should have checked the weather this morning.” Off a gaze and slow shaking of the head, no, Amelie went on, and she offered, “Ten marks.”

The cashier shook her head again. “I can’t do it.”

“Well, thanks anyway,” Amelie said, turning away. It didn’t matter so much, it was just water after all, but something about it still shook her. She’d have to figure it out later, because she had a job to do now. And if it had anything to do with her nightmares, it’d be better thought of on her own time.

She grabbed the binder, and her rifle bag, collapsed her helmet into the bag, and she pushed open the door. She stopped not five meters out the door, when she saw uniformed police officers swarming her car, doors open. She clutched her rifle bag closer, put her head down and started walking the other direction, one eye looking back over her shoulder.

In the downpour, her blue skin was very slightly harder to notice, but one of the officers caught a glimpse of her, and doubtlessly noticed her suspicious gait.

“Halt!” an officer yelled directly after her, but of course she didn’t. Amelie kept a steady pace, and brought her head up to look at the building facades along her side of the street for cameras. She kept going, and the officer again shouted, “Halt!”

They started walking after her, in measured paces that would catch up to her in twenty seconds. Traffic was loose, so loose that there was hardly anyone on the street that could possibly have confused the situation. Amelie was attempting to evade the police, only she couldn’t afford to drop anything she was holding.

_Si c’est une poursuite qu’ils veulent_ , she thought. She quickened her steps, only slightly at first, just enough to maintain her lead until the cops sped up again. Amelie lowered her head. She had to watch for them to make their choice, but of course, they sped up, and so the chase was on.

She broke out, a full sprint to the corner and left turn around. Right as she saw one of them reach toward his holstered pistol, she tore her gaze away. There was no longer any question what Munich Police would do, the only question was where to trap them.

It would take some time to stash the binder in the bag so the pages wouldn’t get wet, and to set up her own weapon, and to get time, she needed distance. It was mindless, but the only thing she could do now was to keep running, a mad dash down the streets while she counted how much further ahead she pulled.

The leading officer rounded the corner and stopped to draw his gun. “Runter runter!” he screamed, lining up his shot. Amelie swept past some nondescript man, who spun around in a daze. He put the gun down, waving the other police officers forwards, “Nach ihr! Nach ihr!”

Almost the entire way down the block from the officers, Amelie erred cautiously and turned the next corner. More space meant more time, and she turned into the first alley she could find. As she slowed down, she glanced for a building side ladder above her, but this alley didn’t have one. She slung the bag off her shoulder and jammed the binder into it, and pulled out her rifle.

Backing into the alley, Amelie dragged her bag with her, keeping it in front of her. In the passing seconds, she retrieved her grappling hook gauntlet from the bag as well. She slid it onto her left wrist, constantly glancing between her arm and the sidewalk. With a click, the gauntlet was secured.

The two fastest policemen ran right past the alley, the next one followed shortly behind, then a fourth, leaving two cops unaccounted for. Counting her heartbeats, Amelie held her breath, and saw one of the four officers circle back. Her finger hovered over the trigger, and the moment he turned his head in her direction, she fired, two shots, center hit.

The gunshots rang out, and all the officers heard it, as did everyone on the streets. Amelie stood up, snatched her bag off the ground and fired the grapple up to the rooftops, where she perched, waiting for the police to enter the alley. At the touch of a switch, the rifle transformed, barrel extended, though she’d left the scope to watch the United Nations office. No matter, she thought, _c’est un coup facile_.

Four heads crowded the end of the alley, and only one stepped in to take a closer look. Amelie edged further from the street end of the roof, lined up a steep shot at the heart of the furthest back officer, and fired. She slumped to the ground, and the others swung their weapons around after a moment’s hesitation, and in that hesitation, the shooter disappeared.

Save for being two stories up, Amelie was now closer to her car than were the police, but there were always fast ways to fall. There were two officers down, one of them certainly dead, the other, not so certainly. If backup wasn’t already here, and since these five officers were only here to inspect her vehicle in the first place, that was likely the case, then she could just kill them all and get away. Preferably before they reported her license plate number to track by GPS instead of after.

Even if reinforcements were already on their way, it would take a few minutes for any to actually arrive, and as much as half an hour before anything seriously threatening could mobilize. By then, Amelie would be long gone. If, on the other hand, they were already here, a shootout could only make things worse. She could hole up, evade detection for all the hours it would take Bishop to get back to Munich with the bomb, and she could trust that Talon had a way to track her down. Because they definitely did.

Even so, surrendering the car to the authorities wasn’t an option. Anything that could potentially expose the organization wasn’t an option. Amelie had to run back to the motel to grab her combat suit.

She swung her rifle bag from one arm to the other and ran to jump across the gap to the top of the building overlooking the street corner. On landing, she looked down to check that her stunt went unseen, and she crossed the roof, sniper rifle raised and steadied, trained on the officer who first drew his gun to shoot.

He stood there, his view sweeping the area, but not bothering to look up or down. A tap on a panel on the outer side of the sniper rifle armed the suppressor, and Amelie fired, straight to the brain, through to the pavement. The dead policeman fell to his knees. Three down, three up.

Crossing like the wind over the roofs, in short order, the BMW was in sight. Amelie switched the rifle back to automatic fire, and shot her hook into the concrete edge. Pulling the wire taut, she dropped over the side, descending fluidly, with grace and mounting tension, until the hook released its grip. The wire coiled back into the gauntlet, Amelie flattened against the wall, gun ready.

Time was of the essence. She was seen once already, it hardly made a difference if she was seen again. She swung out of the alley, looking up the sidewalk for just a moment, scanning the rest of the area to count the witnesses who were many, far too many to gun down.

But that was fine.

As the three remaining officers rounded the corner, Amelie walked close to the car, and turned around, rifle raised, barrel extended. They were saying things, whispering, shouting, it didn’t matter, they were too far away for her to hear.

Bystanders were watching, and their phones were out recording. Within minutes, the world would be abuzz with what she did here, assuming it didn’t get suppressed. Maybe Talon’s cyber warfare crew would take care of it. Maybe the police chief would be cowed into submission at the mere sight of it.

One shot, explosion, ringing, silence. The two officers still on their feet froze in their tracks, reached for their guns, but Amelie could see it, even from here. They didn’t know what to do.

A second thunderous crack ripped through the Munich streets, spewing blood and brain mist all over the drab concrete wall of some small time shop. She lined her third shot, lower now as her target turned tail and ran. And as her finger squeezed the trigger, she could feel her heart hammering, and a cruel, sadistic smile curled onto her lips.

* * *

(An electronics store; Munich, Germany)

On the telescreens on display in the window, local news had been replaying the Blue Terror’s execution of three police officers in broad daylight, albeit with as frequent interruption as the news casters could manage. There was no other word for it, it was an execution and it was savage, and for the oak haired man watching, it was a sign of success.

He stood watching as solemnly as the tragedy demanded, but still faked the glazed over look in the eyes of a clueless onlooker admiring the picture quality. Nobody paid him a second mind, and only a scant few even looked at him at all. Occasionally, he caught the store manager checking his way, perhaps wondering if he’d ever leave.

Behind him approached a woman with blue skin, dressed in a skintight synthetic suit that was cut to nearly expose her breasts. He didn’t look, didn’t even shift until he saw her reflection in the glass, and said nothing until she passed him. And he thought to himself that she was learning well, or at least well enough. “A fine mess you’ve gotten into,” Bishop said. There was still room for improvement.

“And out of,” Amelie replied.

“Not yet.” He beckoned her to follow, away from the store and the view of the cameras, to some side street where a teal car was parked. He clicked a button on the key fob. “Get in.” The back of the car was lowered by a heavy object in the trunk, the bomb, as they had discussed. Amelie sat in front. For reasons even she couldn’t figure out for herself, there was something off putting about the back seat.

Bishop pulled onto the road, driving around Munich, at first aimlessly. “What’s your side of the story?” he asked, about the police shooting, but instead of pausing to hear an answer, he went on. “You’re all over the local news. They think it’s gruesome, and if I was some well-meaning citizen, I would too. But as your handler, my real concern is this. How did the police even get involved?”

“The Dutch woman, Vera,” Amelie said. Earlier in the day, the rooftop position was compromised, the scope setup there discovered. In all likelihood, the Dutch woman had suspected she was watching in person, and hoped to find her there, to catch her red handed. “We’ve been circling each other for most of the morning. She must have tipped them off.”

As they passed by a dark blue BMW on the other side of the street, Amelie looked over and said, “Stop here. I need to check something.” Bishop nodded and slowed to a stop on the sidewalk around the next street corner.

“Get your stuff,” he said as Amelie got out of the car. And out of her car, she took her equipment bag from its spot on the back seat, and then she reached inside the wheel wells, groping around for anything out of the ordinary. Over the back left tire, she felt a piece of plastic, held tight against the metal as her fingers brushed over it. More forcefully, she plied it off.

It was a tracking device. Amelie looked in ahead, then back down at the bug, and she planted it on some other car, thinking about the tail and the call last night. “Huh,” she huffed, on her way back to Bishop.

Jamming her things into the space beneath the glove box, Amelie got into the waiting teal car. “Give me your keys,” he said, and she did as she pulled the passenger door shut.

“The car was bugged,” Amelie said, resigned to having been outmaneuvered in such a basic manner. “Both the women from the bar were in on it. The Dutch woman planted it. That’s how the police found it.” That was her side of the story.

They were driving outwards, towards the city limits, following underneath the Route 9 North to Nuremburg. “This will disappear,” Bishop said. “The footage made it to the local channels, but it won’t break nationally. The cyber teams are working on that. They’ll get their report in first, before we do.”

“Why are you telling me this?” Amelie asked. Her role in Talon was small. She was a field agent, and the politics of the people in charge didn’t matter to her. The only difference they could ever make was changing the missions she was sent on, and even then, she was already assigned to the most demanding operations. It wasn’t as if some other team complaining could get her tasked with anything harder than what she did right now.

Besides, the mission wasn’t even over yet. It was never going to end in Munich, just start there, and go wherever it led.

“I’m telling you this because I put two years into you,” Bishop said, “me, personally. We’re on thin ice. We always have been.”

“Where’s ‘we’ coming from?”

“Talon wanted you to do one thing.” Of course, he wouldn’t tell her what that one thing was, nor would any of the even higher ups. “They wanted you to be disposable. I wanted you to be something more.” She heard that phrase before, in different context, and in different circumstances, but she heard it before. Amelie tried to remember, but just couldn’t. It was like a memory all its own, with all its surroundings lost to oblivion.

“But I am disposable,” Amelie said, craning her head down. “That’s the point. That’s why I’m doing the dirty work, so if I die, someone important doesn’t.” She glanced towards Bishop, and she caught him returning her gaze for just a moment. “Right?”

They stopped at the ramp up to merge with the Route 9 Highway. “This is your escape route,” Bishop said. “Once you’re done, get here and drive north. I’ll find you and lead you to the black site.” He removed a set of keys from a busy keychain and handed it to her. “The car for that is in the garage. It should be on the top floor.”

“Should be?” Amelie prodded.

“I didn’t park it myself.” Bishop pulled away from the ramp and turned back into the inner city. He still didn’t have an answer for why he cared, not a convincing one, at any rate, and it was perhaps the first thing Amelie had ever seen him lack an answer for.

There was a first time for everything of course, and Amelie turned to question herself and her own certainty. She began thinking whether her handler really did invest himself as personally as he let on, or whether she was just a project for him to redeem himself from some past failing. Because as much as she could be right that she was just a cog in a bigger machine, burdened and replaceable, she could just as easily be wrong. Perhaps she wasn’t just Asset 2401, and perhaps Widowmaker wasn’t just a code name.

Perhaps that was who she was. Something one of a kind. Something more.

* * *

(United Nations office complex; Munich, Germany)

Red brake lights dimmed in the dark as the car quieted and stopped by the sidewalk in front of the door to the office building. Amelie reached into the bag for both her gauntlets and clasped them on, doing some simple checks on the grapple. On the right wrist, she loaded both venom mines though she had a feeling they wouldn’t be necessary. Still, they were sensitive enough that a shock might rupture them, and then she’d have a real problem on her hands.

She took her rifle out, made sure all its parts moved the way they should, and laid it across her lap. Amelie pulled out the binder with the charts inside and rested it by its spine on the side of the gun. She retrieved her helmet as well, folding it out and resting it against the steering wheel as she undid her ponytail, and she put on the helmet.

At the touch of a button, the infra-sight visor activated, retracting the covers from the lenses and sliding the display over Amelie’s eyes. As a flashlight, it was a bit much, more high tech than strictly necessary, but also more covert. And in a way, right now, that was needed most.

Amelie read the charts one last time, mouthing the directions for herself for a few still, silent minutes before she shut the binder and stuffed it back in the bag. Zipping it closed, grabbing it by the straps, she got out of the car, taking her gun and one last thing on her way out. She pushed the door shut with her palm, clinking the plastic detonator against the aluminum frame.

Pressing the button on her helmet, the mechanisms slid back and went dormant, until she needed it again. Twenty meters out from the trunk of the car, Amelie turned around, then stepped back further. There wasn’t a sound but the ambient air and her own slow and measured footfalls. Amelie joined the ends of the detonator together, twisted them until they clicked and locked tight.

She looked around, scanned the rooftops for any shifting shades, gazed up to the cameras on the walls of the buildings, and she pressed the button.

Like thunder booming across the sky, the bomb’s roar couldn’t be missed. It blasted the trunk off the back of the car, metal whining as it tore apart, and scraping as it slid across the pavement. Amelie dropped the detonator and felt a strange shivering, like she could feel the electricity in the air.

In less pressing times, she would have liked to take a self-prognosis, but in less pressing times, she wouldn’t have set off an EMP bombs to check for conditions from. And time was pressing.

Amelie walked up to the front door of the UN office and smashed it with the butt end of her rifle. She glanced over her shoulder, wary that someone might have heard it despite already having checked. She saw two cameras positioned on either side of the door, knocked out by the pulse. Those hadn’t been marked on her diagrams, but she quickly realized they wouldn’t have mattered in the first place. Amelie entered the building.

Following her route down to the single steps, she kept an eye out to see where the surveillance matched her expectations, and on the inside, as best as she could visualize the charts in her mind’s eye, it was identical. But the layout of the offices changed, and as she darted her way around the outer ring of the third floor, which room was which was entirely scrambled. Amelie stopped in her tracks. Through the humming darkness, she read the labels on the doors.

Moving on through her labyrinthine path, she circled around the entire floor without coming across Bognar’s office. Up the stairs, she tried the fourth floor, where she just then considered that the doors, while locked, were wired to alarms. She stopped in front of an office door with a sign that read ‘Farago Bognar’. And she thought to herself, there was no way in the world breaking down this door wouldn’t trip an alarm.

But on second thought, it didn’t really matter. An alarm wasn’t a camera, it wouldn’t show she broke in, just that someone did. Amelie tried the doorknob first, knowing, but hoping otherwise, that it was locked. So she pointed the rifle at the lock, held the bag over the muzzle and barrel to block the flash, and she pulled the trigger. She pushed the door open with her foot.

She had her way in.

The office was sparse, and on night vision, she saw loose stacks of papers, and no dust to speak of. The office had been recently settled, as early as that very afternoon, and when she opened up the drawers of the desk, there was nothing inside. On a table by the window, there was a locked case which she picked up and inspected for any hint that it was the ambassador’s and not the minister’s, but she couldn’t make anything out from the stretched cloth. The locking mechanism had a four digit code, and instinctively, she tried the combination 2401.

Amelie set the gun propped up against the side of the desk and sealed up the briefcase in her bag as well. She noticed something, looking out the window. There was a small, red blinking light up and to the right, and near it, a dark figure standing still on the roof. Amelie cycled through the different displays on her visors, to the scope. On the scope’s view, she saw a figure off to the side, and in the corner of the field of view, a cluster of yellow highlight dots.

She shifted her head off to the side, and the dots shifted with her. The shaded figure bent down, and a thin tube stuck out from the mass. Amelie spun on her heels and backed out of the office as the crouching figure’s head lit up.

Holding her bag back over her shoulder again, she traded slowly through the halls. Her feet piloted themselves through the surveillance network as her eyes focused on what was certainly a rooftop shooter, someone gunning for her, specifically. The shape of the enemy’s weapon was obscured, and she hadn’t fired a show yet to identify the gun by sound.

At the very least, Amelie could almost definitely identify the shooter. The Dutch woman who had been stalking her for a day now was the only person who made even a modicum of sense. Something else she’d been faintly pondering was just what it was that Vera did. It wasn’t, strictly speaking, investigation or sleuthing, but given the little bit of her shooting form Amelie could see, she probably wasn’t a soldier first either.

An agent of some kind, sure, but then the question was whose, or where. It had to be a group with intelligence interests in both Talon and the United Nations, because she was looking into both in just a matter of two days, though perhaps she didn’t recognize Talon yet. Perhaps she was a rival, and saw an opportunity to eliminate one of Talon’s assets. The Widowmaker had been making some small passes in the cloak and dagger field, and it was eminently possible, her employers would say preferable, that she be treated as a serious threat.

If so, Vera had to know she was here, in Munich, in the first place, and Bishop had taken considerable measures to make sure nobody knew Amelie was here. And that, in one stairwell and thinking of another, was when she remembered her handler’s interactions with this adversary. In the name of cover, of course, but cover from which end, now Amelie wasn’t so sure.

As she got down to the ground level of the office, she thought, there had to be repercussions. If Bishop had sold her out, there was no way in the world Talon wouldn’t find out about it, no way he’d ever get away with it. His “thin ice” remark hinted as much.

She stopped one turn away from the front door. Something was wrong. Judging by the time on her heads up display, it took less time to come downstairs from the third floor than it had taken to go up, and by too much time to attribute solely to the uphill walk. For how fast she was walking, she got downstairs too soon. She got lost in her mind, in her thoughts. She deviated from her track.

And she got caught on camera.

There was no undoing that now. The hacking team had its work cut out, and either they were up to the task or they weren’t. Amelie raised her rifle, toggled its long range configuration, and pointed it up toward the rooftops, turning and backing into the hallway.

The shadows above were shifting. The thin tube, the barrel of a rifle, was slowly tracking her through the building, angled steeper now than it was minutes ago. With each step, drawing closer to the door, Amelie’s breath slowed, but her heart rate picked up. It could sense what was coming.

She deactivated her helmet, disconnected it from the scope’s feed as she stepped through the doorway, over crunching glass shards, and up above, directly over the nub at the deadly end of the Widow’s Kiss, she saw a head turn to the side.

Amelie fired. The shrouded head flung back and down, out of view. The gunshot echoed through the night.

She let her rifle bag slip off her shoulder and slump to the ground as she shot her grappling hook onto the edge of the roof. Gun in hand, she flew through the air and grabbed at the concrete as she climbed over the parapet to gaze at her work.

A tall, blonde corpse lay on top of the roof with a chunk of her forehead missing. The dust of a shattered shard of skull lined frame of the door behind her, and Amelie reached up to grab her scope off its fixture and reattach it her rifle. She checked the woman’s gun, stripping its bullets out, and laid it down, and she rifled through the woman’s pockets.

There was some loose cash and change, the key to her car, bank cards, licenses for various vigilante roles, the key card to a hotel, and identification.

‘Vera Grijsel’

‘Overwatch’

_Oh. Fuck._

Amelie pulled up a strip of the fabric of her suit over her breasts and stuffed the identification cards there. She tossed Vera’s weapon and body over the edge of the roof, as she snatched her own gun and scrambled down the fire escape ladder on the side. Running by to snag her rifle bag, she dashed into the garage to find the dark silver car that matched the keys in her hand.

Immediately, she dropped her things in the back seat and drove down to the street, by the sidewalk where a splattered body and steel and plastic fragments lay strewn on the cement.  She opened the trunk and picked all the pieces of human off the pavement that she could, and threw them onto the felt in the back. She left the gun smashed to pieces, there was nothing to be done with it anyway, and started driving away, turning on the car lights. She pulled the stack of cards out of her suit, shuffled to the hotel key card, and turned it over.

There was another building to raid.

**Author's Note:**

> Translation notes:
> 
> Il doit y avoir une note quelque part = There must be a note [scrap] somewhere  
> Allons, ou est-ce? = Come on, where is it?  
> Gerard Lacroix trouvé mort dans sa maison = Gerard Lacroix found dead in his home  
> Il y a deux ans = Two years ago  
> Pourrait être une coïncidence = Could be a coincidence  
> (Mais) il existe une alternative = (But) there is an alternative  
> (Oh,) être encore dix-neuf = (Oh,) to be nineteen again
> 
> Höflichkeitsruf, Frau Tremblay = Courtesy call, Mrs. Tremblay (GER)  
> Es ist jetzt 06:15 uhr = The time now is 6:15 AM (GER)  
> Wenn sie möchten, kann ich ein paar diners zum Frühstück empfehlen = If you want, I can recommend a few diners for breakfast (GER)  
> Nein, mir geht es gut, danke = No, I'm fine, thank you (GER)
> 
> Merci beaucorp = Thank you very much  
> Pourrait être un roi = Could be a king
> 
> Fakultät = Faculty (GER)
> 
> A quoi ressemblent les gens d'Avignon? = What do people from Avignon sound like?  
> Fils de pute, je ne peux pas le croire = Son of a bitch, I can't believe this  
> C'est un vrai mystère pour sûr = It's a real mystery for sure  
> Pas exactement hors de propos = Not exactly out of place  
> Une certaine prudence latente peut être = Some latent caution maybe  
> Et s'ils pensent que je ne sais pas? = And what if they think I don't know?  
> Comment agiraient-ils dans ce cas? = How would they act in that case?  
> Un = One; Deux = Two; Trois = Three; Quatre = Four  
> Cent quatre-vingts = One hundred eighty  
> Notre gars = Our guy  
> Je sais que je vous ai rencontré avant = I know I met you before  
> Il doit être proche de la congélation = It must be close to freezing  
> Comment puis-je savoir cela? = How do I know that?  
> Bonsoir = Good evening  
> Tu sais = You know  
> Prend un pour en connaître un = Takes one to know one  
> Ils sont parfaits l'un pour l'autre = They are perfect for each other  
> Pas de sens attirer son attention = No sense getting her attention  
> Très peu mais pas ne rien = Very little, but not nothing  
> Il n'y a pas d'éviter cela, n'est-ce pas? = There's no avoiding this, is there?
> 
> Je suis désolé, je suis en retard = I'm sorry, I'm late  
> Ne vous en faites pas = Don't worry about it  
> Je suis juste content que tu sois là = I'm just glad you're here  
> J'avais peur de manquer ça = I was afraid I would miss this  
> Vous êtes ici maintenant = You're here now  
> Combien de temps allez-vous être allé? = How long will you be gone?  
> Quelques années au moins = A few years a least  
> Mais je reviendrai tout de suite = But I will come right back  
> Vous n'avez pas à faire ça pour moi = You don't have to do that for me  
> Je pourrais avoir à le faire pour moi = I might have to do it for myself  
> Vis ta vie = Life your life  
> Attends-moi, et je te promets de te trouver = Wait for me, and I promise I'll find you  
> Je t'aime = I love you  
> Si c'est une poursuite qu'ils veulent = If it's a pursuit they want
> 
> Runter runter! = Get down! (GER)  
> Nach ihr! = After her! (GER)
> 
> C'est un coup facile = It's an easy shot


End file.
